Posted by Luli Perkins, Developer Relations Program Manager

The final edition of #AndroidDevJourney spotlight features four Android developers, each with their own story to tell. Over the last six months we’ve heard from developers all over the globe who have shared their experiences in becoming Android Developers, their tips and favorite shortcuts, as well as advice for new developers entering the field.

Read all other profiles in this series:

Here are words of wisdom that were frequently mentioned:

• Read the documentation.
• Look under the hood.
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
• Join the community.

If you’re looking for documentation, developer.android.com is the place to look. And if you’re searching for a community where you’ll be welcome regardless of where in the world you are, come find us on Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Github, or a GDG meetup near you.

Vinay Gaba

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My journey with Android started back in 2010 in a really unexpected manner. I was responsible for managing an Android workshop happening during our college tech festival. We had invited an external speaker to conduct the session and a few students had signed up for it. Unfortunately, since this was happening on a Saturday, not a single student showed up for the session.

Since the speaker had come all the way, the speaker decided to do his session anyway and share what he knew about Android with me being his only audience. I went home excited with the very basic Android fundamentals that I'd just learnt and created a scientific calculator app over the weekend. I launched it on the Google Play store as a paid app. What's more shocking is that the app had generated enough revenue in a couple days to take care of my expenses for the rest of the month. This event had a profound impact on my life and I'm so grateful that I found myself at the right place and the right time.

Since then, I've worked for some of the best engineering teams including Airbnb, Snapchat, Spotify, and Deloitte. I’ve lived across six cities in two countries, put myself through an Ivy League education on a partial scholarship, and made lifelong friendships. There was only one thing that was consistent throughout all those experiences and that is Android.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

One shortcut that I use every single day is the command to find other commands on Android Studio using CMD + Shift + A. This is extremely useful when you are trying to do an action on Android Studio but don't know where it's hidden in our favorite IDE. Using this command opens up the "Find Action" dialog and allows you to just type what you were looking for to begin with. This shortcut saves my day on a daily basis!

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Just ask. Early on in my career, I would often spend time trying to figure things out all by myself. While this certainly has some advantages, I would often be stuck on things longer than I should've. In a lot of cases, all I had to do was just ask someone who had more context and that would've allowed me to spend time on things that mattered. Given that we all have limited time in our day, it's critical that we choose our battles wisely.

Victoria Gonda

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

When I started college, I was majoring in dance. A friend suggested that I try a computer science course because they thought I would enjoy the types of problems you solve in code, and they were right!

Fast forward, and I had the opportunity to take part in a computer science summer research program. Over the summer, I learned Android and helped build an app to help a student with cognitive disabilities ride the local bus. It was this project that showed me how I could use software to make a difference in people's lives.

While I continued studying both dance and computer science, I pursued an internship, and later a career, that would allow me to continue to improve the world using Android development.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

The combination of the developer tool to keep the screen on while charging and a device stand on my desk. I save so much time not needing to reach for my testing device, turn the screen on (and probably unlock it) and finally see what I'm looking for. Instead, it loads right before my eyes.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

You don't need to define yourself by the work you do or the company you work for. I felt really conflicted when I chose a software career over a dance career. But I still dance! I felt conflicted when I moved from one company to another, but that company didn't define who I am.

Gilbert Leung

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

In 2010, I bought my first smart phone in the form of an HTC Nexus One. I was still in college back then and jumped into Android development as soon as I received the device. One of my first Android projects was a neat little keyboard / input method that took ideas from the old school T9 method and applied it onto a touch screen. Check out the video here and the Github repository here. It's been 11 years since; so much has changed. I'm now the CTO at a small startup Shuffle, yet I'm still working hard on Android development!

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

For debugging, use breakpoint logging instead of LogCat logging. Go to the line you want to log and add a breakpoint. Then right-click on the red dot of the breakpoint and deselect the Suspend checkbox. A more detailed view should suddenly open and let you select Log message to console. This avoids recompiling and rerunning the app, and is absolutely crucial in large projects that take a long time to recompile. The advanced breakpoint options can also be valuable for trickier situations.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

I wish someone told me to browse the Android source code more often. I learned so much looking underneath the hood and developed an expertise far deeper than the average developer.

The Android Developer community prides itself in its inclusivity and welcomes developers from all backgrounds and stages of life. If you’re feeling inspired and want to learn more about how to become a part of our community, here are a few resources to help get you started.

The Google Developer Groups program gives developers the opportunity to meet local developers with similar interests in technology. A GDG meetup event includes talks on a wide range of technical topics where you can learn new skills through hands-on workshops.

Founded in 2014, Google’s Women Techmakers is dedicated to helping all women thrive in tech through community, visibility and resources. With a member base of over 100,000 women developers, we’re working with communities across the globe to build a world where all women can thrive in tech.

The Google Developers Experts program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts, influencers and thought leaders who actively support developers, companies and tech communities by speaking at events, publishing content, and building innovative apps. Experts actively contribute to and support the developer and startup ecosystems around the world, helping them build and launch highly innovative apps.

Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Posted by Luli Perkins, Developer Relations Program Manager

The May edition of #AndroidDevJourney spotlights five Android developers from around the world and each of their own unique experiences. In January we started the #AndroidDevJourney series to highlight members of the Android developer community on our Twitter account. As we reach the end of our six month journey, be sure to check out all the great developers we’ve featured on Twitter. 

Mada Aflak

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My journey in becoming an Android Developer started in 2015, during my final year of engineering school in Paris. My friends and I created a startup that allows you to easily create social events. As an Android user, my mission was to create an Android app. The experience made me excited to build apps, brainstorm products, engage with users; understand metrics and the process of innovation.

Initially, learning to code in Android was a tool to help reach my goal: to create a product that would be used by the largest audience possible. My passion to develop on Android, however, gave me the patience and perseverance needed to self-improve and become an expert. I realized the key to success is consistency: that step-by-step progress allows big achievements.

Although I entered the Android field by chance, I feel very grateful to have specialized in a technology which allows me to reach the huge Android marketplace, with an incredibly diverse user base. I believe when you love working on products, specifically in B2C business, being a client software engineer is very appealing. You’re in a unique position where you can interact with customers, as well as product, design, backend, and data scientists.

After receiving my Master's, I took intensive Java training and worked at a chic software consultant engineering company, in the famous avenue Les Champs & Elysee. Whilst I learned a lot from this experience, I wanted to give entrepreneurship another shot so I left Paris for San Francisco and opened a startup called Tribe, with friends. Tribe consisted of 10 talented French entrepreneurs aiming to re-invent the video chat messaging app. This is where I started to specialize in live video streaming technology and - more precisely - WebRTC.

Tribe gathered thousands of upvotes on Product Hunt and was awarded several times by worldwide institutions including Google and Time, and also featured in various international publications such as TechCrunch, Business Insider, and more! Our hard work and determination led us to be backed by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins Capital. This experience was utterly unique: we all were working and living in the same house with a common goal to create an everlasting impact! With this experience, I learned the power of collective intelligence; that people will go far in learning how to work with each other.

After three years of entrepreneurship, we made the hard decision to discontinue Tribe and I decided to return to Europe. During this time, Twitter contacted me for my skills in live video streaming technology. As my passion for social science, politics and economy was growing, Twitter interested me greatly as it’s the only social media platform that enables public conversation; its main focus is to highlight and discuss what’s happening in the world. Considering myself a “citizen of the word”, I found that its purpose resonated strongly with me: a global inclusive platform, where everyone has a voice. What I love the most about working at Twitter is that Twitter has a unique position by being relatively small as a company, but has a huge impact on society.

My Twitter journey began working on a live video streaming product on Periscope, called Hydra. After sunsetting Periscope, my team began to wonder what to do with the live streaming publishing pipeline technology that we built. We then partook in a brainstorm session, concluding that audio was an under-used and under-valued media that could enhance and drive Twitter’s public conversation.

We started small with one developer on each platform, reaping the benefits of being a small team that could iterate and move fast. Today, the team has vastly expanded and I am proudly operating as the Android Space Tech Lead. Twitter Space has now become one of the company's top priorities: we have only just started to witness the powerful impact of live audio, with a social media network set to drastically change social behavior.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

Learning how to use Android Studio property is a must! There are many hidden tools in Android Studio that can help developer velocity.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

1- Learn English fluently

2- Don’t be afraid to make mistakes

3- Work on something you love!

Lin Guo

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

That was a story from a long time ago. I was learning Java when I got into college in 2008. One day in 2010, I was just browsing the Internet as usual, and found a course talking about how to learn Android development. That was the first time I heard about Android. It was a brand-new mobile system for me, besides, Java just happened to be the designated programming language for it. I was very interested at that time, and made a decision to get onboard.

Now I am an Android GDE and work for Microsoft where I continue my Android development journey. I also published a book in 2014 which is the best-selling Android programming book in China. I feel so fortunate to have made that decision in 2010.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I really do have one. Use Ctrl+W to expand selection in Android Studio.

This is absolutely my favorite one. I often have some conditions where I need to copy some part of code to somewhere else. Dragging to select is the last thing I want to do. With Ctrl+W, I can always select the part of the code just as I wanted quickly and conveniently. Thanks to Google and JetBrains.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

I joined the Microsoft Edge mobile team recently. It is an Android project, but most of the code was written in C++. I was struggling with it at first, because I had never written C++ code before.

Now, I have started learning C++ programming from scratch. It is still a happy journey to learn something new. But I wish someone would have given me this advice when I started with Android: C++ is also an important part of Android development.

Anita Singh

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

I started my career after university in Silicon Valley as a Java backend engineer and was curious about mobile, and wanted to give it a try. At my first job, I was working at Intuit on Mint and asked the mobile PM if I could help out with either the iOS or Android app.

At the time I was an iOS user so I was leaning towards iOS, but upon research I saw that Android was dominating in the global market. Since I already knew Java, the barrier of entry was lower.

I then joined the Mint mobile team and learned Android development on the job, converted to being an Android user and never looked back :-). Since then I’ve led both Android and cross-functional teams, and enjoy collaborating across functions to deliver great mobile experiences to users.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

The “Design View” in Android Studio where I can quickly see what screens look like in night mode, landscape, and small devices while developing screens, helps save time.

In the Compose world, Interactive Mode and Deploy Preview are quite handy in quickly iterating over them as well. I am looking forward to performance improvements here.

A second tip would be to use the Accessibility Scanner to help identify accessibility improvements. This is another great tool that can give you quick wins!

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

To lean into the Android community. I relied solely on Android documentation to learn when I started, and didn’t know about the supportive community and content that surrounds it until later!

Reading blog posts, watching/giving talks, and connecting with other developers accelerated my learning, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Marion Hayoun

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My Android journey began with a G1, the very first commercialized Android smartphone. It had a built-in keyboard, a joystick and hard buttons, to me it was amazing. At the time I was still in engineering school and hadn't even developed in Java yet but I had the opportunity to help organize meetups with the Paris Android User Group.

That’s how I started to meet people and saw what they were trying to build. Everyone I met at the time was really open minded and I wanted to be a part of this community and contribute to this platform by building beautiful apps too.

I started my professional journey back in 2012 and had the opportunity to work for editors and in agencies too. Today I’m working at Dashlane and I’m still organizing events with the Paris Android User Group :)

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I used to mostly rely on Find Usage ⌥F7 to navigate code base, but then I started using Go to Implementation ⌥⌘B. It is really *really* helpful to jump to any interface's implementation right away. It is a "more advanced" shortcut, but it is one that will make navigating a codebase with composition, contract, multi-modules, etc. really smooth. Especially when an interface and implementation can be far apart in the file hierarchies.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Find what works for you to keep learning. Huyen Tue Dao gave an amazing talk with a lot of advice on this, check it out here. She covered talks, to podcasts, articles, newsletters, Twitter, community, sketchnotes, and more. She shared a lot of ways to stay up to date and gave us the honest truth: you just can't keep up with everything ^^ So find what best fits you and your lifestyle to keep improving and learning.

There will always be highs and lows in your career; knowing people who will support you is why you may be able to overcome challenges in the long run. And that is why, I would recommend you to take a look at your local developer community. Those are perfect spots to learn, share what you learn, and meet people who understand what you're doing. It’s perfect to gain knowledge, take a step back, share advice and experiences, and support each other. We're human first and foremost, and most solutions are human too.

Gonzalo Serrano

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My path to becoming an Android developer started my senior year of high school when I Googled “What do you need to do to be a computer programmer?” We had a class assignment about researching a career. I had always been interested in coding. As a kid, I played way too many video games and wanted to learn how they worked. Then, when I got into high school, I started teaching myself to code from reading blogs.

I grew up poor in East Los Angeles and went to a school that had little money with very little access to quality technology. I didn’t know anyone else who was coding, but the Internet said to be a developer, you needed to go to college and get a bachelor’s degree. So I went and studied computer science, learning C++, JavaScript, Java, and other languages.

In 2014, I went to a panel at my community college and met AnnMaria, a co-founder of 7 Generation Games, where we develop educational games aimed at closing the math gap, especially within Latino and Indigenous communities. I applied for an internship, because I wanted to be part of making software for good. Initially, we were just making games for computers or to run on the web. But as technology evolved and we expanded to mobile, it was really important that we were developing for Android because those are the primary devices people are using in many of the communities we’re in. Because of my background, developing for Android was especially important to me because I know how valuable quality and accessible technology is for students. In 2016, I offered to take the lead on our first Android project, a game - now a series - called Making Camp. I downloaded Android Studio, cracked open the documentation and got to work.

When I graduated with my bachelor’s in 2018, I joined 7 Generation Games full-time. I am now our lead Android developer and just put our 10th app into Google Play.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

On Android, I primarily work in WebView. When trying to execute JavaScript code on the WebView from outside the page, it is easily facilitated by passing a string in Java with the code you want to execute. But the reverse is less common. My hack for this is if you want the app to react to JavaScript code, you have to create an event to catch the error returned from the page, then parse the string for what you wanted to do and react outside the WebView with that information.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Don't be afraid to ask questions. Don't think everyone knows more than you because they don't. That said, the most useful piece of advice I was given was to read documentation. It might seem simple, but I’ve been surprised by how often people don’t. That’s advice I would give to anyone starting out.

The Android Developer community prides itself in its inclusivity and welcomes developers from all backgrounds and stages of life. If you’re feeling inspired and want to learn more about how to become a part of our community, here are a few resources to help get you started.

The Google Developer Groups program gives developers the opportunity to meet local developers with similar interests in technology. A GDG meetup event includes talks on a wide range of technical topics where you can learn new skills through hands-on workshops.

Founded in 2014, Google’s Women Techmakers is dedicated to helping all women thrive in tech through community, visibility and resources. With a member base of over 100,000 women developers, we’re working with communities across the globe to build a world where all women can thrive in tech.

The Google Developers Experts program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts, influencers and thought leaders who actively support developers, companies and tech communities by speaking at events, publishing content, and building innovative apps. Experts actively contribute to and support the developer and startup ecosystems around the world, helping them build and launch highly innovative apps.

Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Posted by Luli Perkins, Developer Relations Program Manager

We’re wrapping up the April edition of #AndroidDevJourney by highlighting Android developers from all over the world each with their own unique experience. Early this year, we launched the #AndroidDevJourney series to highlight our community on our social media accounts. Each Saturday, from January through June, we’ll feature a new developer on our Twitter account.

We’re getting near the end of our six month journey, so don’t miss your chance to be featured in one of our last two spotlight series, tweet us your story using #AndroidDevJourney.

Mohit Sarveiya

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

I started my journey first as a backend developer 10 years ago while teaching myself Android development on the side. I had an opportunity to create an app from scratch. My first app had in-app-purchasing, notifications, and video playback. It wasn’t easy. I was the only Android developer and I learned as I went along. I kept building on this experience and have worked on building many apps in the past 10 years.

In my journey, I was an early adopter of Kotlin. During that time, there were very few resources to learn Kotlin. I learned Kotlin by converting lots of Java code to Kotlin. I’m grateful to have learned Kotlin early on. Coding is what I do, but not who I am. There have been many obstacles in my journey. But, Kotlin was my medium to discover my passion. It has had a profound impact on my life.

I have helped companies adopt Kotlin and Kotlin Coroutines on both Android and backend. I enjoy teaching it. I shared my experiences through tech talks. For the past eight years I gave a tech talk every month in the NYC community. Every talk has meant so much to me, because of what I went through to prepare for it. My adversity has been my motivator. Everyone sees the results, but not the process. I discovered my passion for public speaking and developer advocacy. After eight years, I became a GDE in Android & Kotlin and I’m still on this journey to inspire others.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

Finding ways to incorporate automation in your solutions is one of the attributes of a good developer. I have observed it in many examples through out my career. For example, a developer wrote an annotation processor to generate custom adapters and to generate models based on API specifications. Another example is a developer who wrote a generator to setup the scaffolding for a module. Its valuable to find ways to automate tasks.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

You will seldomly work on green field projects. You will work on an app that already exists and has been built over the years. You’ll work on teams that have diverse perspectives on best practices on Android throughout your career. You may not work on an Android app that is using a modern Android development stack. You’ll find many obstacles navigating this spectrum. But, the obstacle is the way.

Imangi Studios

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

We first became an Android Developers when we made Temple Run! We started out with a bang. Fans instantly all of the world came to love playing Temple Run on Android and we were happy to develop the game for Android!

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

Tip 1 - To help deal with the larger number of Android devices out there, build a device farm with a wide range of devices, and do robust automated testing on your app from the start.

Tip 2 - Build releases and store listings can be updated independently.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Advice 1 - The biggest thing that struck us about Android development is just how many devices there are out there. Google Play supports tens of thousands of devices, and if you want to cover a sizable portion of those, you need to plan ahead for things like quality controls, asset tiering, and content delivery specced. If we could go back to the beginning of Temple Run 2 and have known that at the start, we could have planned a game that would look and run even better across an even bigger range of devices.

Advice 2 - The industry moves fast so be open to change and research your craft.

Valentine Rutto

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My Android development journey started in 2015. I was doing my computer science degree and I felt that there was a gap between the theory and practical technical skills so I enrolled in the Moringa School coding bootcamp. Here I was introduced to Android development by the then instructor and cofounder Frank Tamre. I immediately fell in love with Android and I have been hooked ever since.

The Google Developer Groups and WomenTechMakers communities have played a great role in my journey. The tech community provides invaluable resources that have immensely helped in my career growth. I was the Women TechMakers Nyeri chapter lead for about two years where I taught Android development to aspiring developers. Through the community I was able to meet brilliant Android developers who I still learn from everyday.

Currently I always aim to contribute to the tech community in whatever capacity I can.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I can't live without JsonToKotlin plugin it is an efficient tool that makes JSON deserialization easy and fast.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Read the developer documentation, it will save you a lot of time which would otherwise have been wasted on trial and error.

Joe Birch

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

I started working with Android while I was studying at university, and it was actually kind of by chance! One of my lecturers had some friends who were looking to build an app for their company. Truth is, at this point I had not even had an Android phone for long but I jumped at the chance to build something for a real client. During this build, I pretty much fell in love with Android and quickly became fascinated in how portable and accessible things that you build would become. As soon as I started building that project, I knew this is how I wanted my start off my career.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

For me, split screen in Android Studio has really helped my productivity when working on some projects. Whether it's during refactoring or working with a file and its corresponding tests, being able to display multiple files side-by-side removes the need to manually hop between them. Within Android Studio, you can do this by right-clicking on the tab for a file and selecting either "Split Horizontally" or "Split Vertically.” The selected file will then shift to a seperate section and you can work on that code at the same time as another file within a separate section.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Don't get too caught up in making things perfect or strictly following standards. When I started out building things privately or sharing things in the public, I felt I had to match up to these and was worried too much about making mistakes.

All learning is a journey, we will always make mistakes and that's where growth comes from! While topics things can be important, getting something tangible in your hands can be incredibly motivating - something that can be slowed down greatly if you get caught up here. It's still worth diving in deeper and learning how things work once you have something working, but it can be inspiring to get something built without getting caught up in too many of the details!

The Android Developer community prides itself in its inclusivity and welcomes developers from all backgrounds and stages of life. If you’re feeling inspired and want to learn more about how to become a part of our community, here are a few resources to help get you started.

The Google Developer Groups program gives developers the opportunity to meet local developers with similar interests in technology. A GDG meetup event includes talks on a wide range of technical topics where you can learn new skills through hands-on workshops.

Founded in 2014, Google’s Women Techmakers is dedicated to helping all women thrive in tech through community, visibility and resources. With a member base of over 100,000 women developers, we’re working with communities across the globe to build a world where all women can thrive in tech.

The Google Developers Experts program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts, influencers and thought leaders who actively support developers, companies and tech communities by speaking at events, publishing content, and building innovative apps. Experts actively contribute to and support the developer and startup ecosystems around the world, helping them build and launch highly innovative apps.

Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Posted by Luli Perkins, Developer Relations Program Manager

For the March edition of #AndroidDevJourney, we’re highlighting Android developers from all over the world with many different experiences. Early this year, we launched the #AndroidDevJourney series to highlight our community on our social media accounts. Each Saturday, from January through June, we’ll feature a new developer on our Twitter account.

For a chance to be featured in our April spotlight series, tweet us your story using #AndroidDevJourney.

Wajahat Karim

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

Since the age of 14, I was very interested in animations and graphic design. I used to watch advertisement animations or cricket match animations of player profiles on TV and wonder how I could create these. Later that year, when my sister purchased our home's first PC, I started learning Microsoft Paint and later Adobe Flash. I worked on Flash for about 11 years throughout high school, University, and my first three jobs in game development.

Game development was and has been my first love in computer science. But, Android became something special for me. It was NOT love-at-first sight because I hated Android when I first learned about it. I still don't know why. Coming from a poor family background, I got a fully-funded scholarship through Prime Minister ICT R&D Scholarship Program and enrolled in National University of Engineering & Technology (NUST), SEECS Islamabad campus.

In my 3rd semester, Android was at 2.2 Froyo. A company organized a workshop at our campus which was attended by high-level tech folks like CTOs, software architects, and lead engineers. University management decided to send three students to attend that workshop and I was lucky enough to be one of them. In simple words, the whole 3-days workshop was over my head. I was a newbie in C++ programming and didn't know anything about Java. And here I was trying to learn high-level Android.

After the workshop, I decided that Android was not for me. However, the university announced an open programming competition for any technology. But they gave extra points for Android submissions. This was my calling. In greed of those extra points, I took up the challenge. I borrowed the only Android book "Hello Android" from my teacher, Sir Shamyl bin Mansoor, and tried to learn as much as I could. Somehow, I managed to submit my first Android app which I showcased on a borrowed laptop with a very slow emulator of Android 2.2. To my surprise, I won it and got Rs. 100,000 prize money. First thing I bought was an Android phone and my journey started.

I started writing about it in a WordPress blog, organized workshops in different universities, made my final year project a 3D game in Adobe Flash, and AIR deployed on a Samsung Galaxy 10 tablet which had a new Android 4 Holo theme and the great Fragments.

After graduation, I got an opportunity from PacktPub (a book publishing company) to write a full book on Android. This was the best achievement I ever received. I managed to co-author two worldwide published 300+ page books (Learning Android Intents & Mastering Android Game Development) on Android in the following two years.

Having about seven years industry hands-on experience in Android development, I spend a lot of time on writing and sharing my knowledge with the community. I mostly write on my website and on Medium. Besides writing, I have been active in open source and have created some Android libraries like EasyFlipView, Room Explorer, etc.

In 2017, I started doing public speaking again. At first, it was a little tough to manage time while working a full-time job and freelance contracts, but it was worth it. I got more and more active in speaking and gave talks at events like Google IO Extended Karachi & Hyderabad in 2018 and 2019, DevFest 2019 Karachi, Pakistan's first DSC Summit, Kotlin Everywhere 2019, and other local events.

From these events, Sami Kizilbash noticed me and nominated me for becoming a Google Developers Expert. It was a tough time because of a serious medical situation with my father at that time, but a year later in February 2020 I became Pakistan's first Google Developers Expert in Android. I never thought that I would be a GDE in a field like Android. It is a big honor and achievement for me, along with a feeling of responsibility to help the community in a better way now. Android development has been my life fuel, career, brought bread for me and my family and happiness in developing and delivering more than 100 apps. With more than 2.5 billion Android devices today, this is an excellent career choice with high growth and potential for upcoming students and developers.

My GDE journey has been a fantastic one. I have enjoyed every moment of it, all the love I got from Google and fellow GDEs - including Joe Birch who actually inspired me to become GDE, Hasan Abid, Saurabh Arora, and Juhani Lehtimaki, and Saad Hamid who also helped me through the process. In all the chaos of 2020, it was a very talkative year for me, as I did 25+ online talks on Jetpack Compose animations concepts.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I simply love how Mnemonic Bookmarks make code navigation so much faster and easier. When you are working on a large codebase, it becomes harder to remember which method was where and what was happening in another Fragment. Simply, press Ctrl + F11 and choose any number or character, let's say 1. Now, when you press Ctrl + 1, Android Studio will bring you back on that exact line.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Himanshu Singh

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My journey started from my college days. I got selected as an Applied CS facilitator for Android by Google in my second year of university. Because of this, I had to take sessions and help students complete a set of tasks as part of Bootcamp. In my college days I was not very good at Android, so when the opportunity came I took it upon myself to gain some knowledge of Android and then help people with their tasks. Learning to build apps that would be used by a lot of people helped me choose Android as a career. And that is how my journey to become an Android developer started.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I like to use the Macro shortcut in Android Studio.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

As a beginner in any domain, not just Android, please keep asking questions on how to improve and learn from people in the community. Some of them might not answer your queries but a handful of them might. And in this way, you can learn and grow from their experience and when the time is right, you might be able to help someone in the coming future. This is the key to success!

Oluwasegun Famisa

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My journey in becoming an Android Developer started in 2010, my second year of university when I had the opportunity to participate in a program called “Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles” (EPROM). It was a collaboration between MIT and Nokia, and my university was one of the campuses that ran the program. I did not study computer science, so the program was my first exposure to software development. I learned how to build J2ME apps and got exposure to different mobile technologies at the time.

Shortly after the program, I got a work-study opportunity at iQube Labs, where my mentor - James Fowe, who was building a mobile developer community in Nigeria - sent me a bunch of resources and tasks for me to learn how to build Android apps. The Android OS around 2010 was Android Froyo and that was the operating system on which I ran my “Hello world” on Android. Within the next year, I found myself building actual apps on Android Gingerbread.

I have since worked as an Android Developer in different companies ranging from small to mid-sized startups with millions of users, to publicly traded companies, all across many countries. I’ve had the opportunity of working with very brilliant folks that have contributed to my growth and learning.

My journey is not complete without talking about the developer community. I consider myself a product of the community and that’s why I try to give back every now and then when I have the opportunity.

I started getting involved in the developer community at my university - through various student groups, including my local GDG group then co-organized by Moyinoluwa Adeyemi (an Android GDE). I attended meetups and participated in developer challenges and hackathons.

Becoming a GDE for Android is a career milestone I never saw coming. It started in 2016 when John Kimani (Google DevRel manager for SSA) toured my office and we ran into each other at the door. I wasn’t prepared enough to become a GDE the first time my profile was reviewed, but with feedback, guidance, mentorship and hard work, I became an Android GDE in 2018.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to travel to so many countries around the world and meet members of the global Android Developer community. I’ve also given talks at conferences and meetups; including DevFests, Droidcon (Nairobi, Dubai, Berlin, Boston), and 360AnDev, to mention a few, about topics I enjoy - Kotlin, Design Systems, Jetpack Compose, and Developer Productivity Engineering.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

That’s such a tough one, but I’ll say my favourite AndroidDev tip right now is: use the Android code search tool - https://cs.android.com - and Android API documentation as often as possible. (See also: https://androidsrc.dev/)

The two resources have helped me in answering the “why is this not working” question and understanding what’s happening under the hood. A lot of times, I need to really understand what the Framework function I’m calling does, and the answer is almost always in the documentation or in the source code.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

I’ll give two for the price of one:

1. Structure and consistency are important when learning. One can’t possibly know everything, but one can try with enough of these two ingredients. Structured learning is becoming more and more accessible these days than it was, so one should take advantage of it, consistently - through codelabs, or courses and the likes.
2. Get used to reading official documentations and official source codes. This is a valuable and transferable skill regardless of the technology one works with, so I would advise not to shy away from it.

Karolina Pawlikowska

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

From a young age, I’ve always loved science fiction books and movies – I always had a gut feeling that whatever career path I went down, it would have something to do with computers. Programming quickly became my favourite creative outlet – it started with creating websites and apps when I was 11, mainly as a way to enhance my other passions such as drawing and making puzzles for my friends.

I got my first Android phone when I was in high school and immediately knew it would open a whole new world of opportunities for me, so I picked up a few books and found a few online tutorials which got me started with code on my phone running Android 2.1 Eclair.

My first app was a flashcards maker. I needed something like that to help me learn English and I couldn’t find anything online - so I made my own!

Thanks to a few of my passion projects, including a flashcard maker app, I managed to quickly land a job as an Android Engineer while I was still completing my Computer Science degree at university. I then tried working across a few other areas in software engineering, but ultimately, Android was always my favourite and ended up becoming my specialty!

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

It’s not quite a hack, but I honestly don’t know how I lived before ConstraintLayout became a thing! Oh – and Android Weekly’s mailing list, definitely one of the best ways to get all of the relevant news and tutorials in the Android world delivered directly to you every Monday!

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Looking back, I definitely recommend putting effort and being really intentional about seeking out other Android engineers around you. Once I started proactively attending meetups and working with other engineers, my skills and knowledge grew exponentially. Collaborating and bouncing around ideas has always been my favourite way to find creative and innovative solutions to problems I’m working on.

Posted by Luli Perkins, Developer Relations Program Manager

For the March edition of #AndroidDevJourney, we’re highlighting Android developers from all over the world with many different experiences. Early this year, we launched the #AndroidDevJourney series to highlight our community on our social media accounts. Each Saturday, from January through June, we’ll feature a new developer on our Twitter account.

For a chance to be featured in our April spotlight series, tweet us your story using #AndroidDevJourney.

Wajahat Karim

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

Since the age of 14, I was very interested in animations and graphic design. I used to watch advertisement animations or cricket match animations of player profiles on TV and wonder how I could create these. Later that year, when my sister purchased our home's first PC, I started learning Microsoft Paint and later Adobe Flash. I worked on Flash for about 11 years throughout high school, University, and my first three jobs in game development.

Game development was and has been my first love in computer science. But, Android became something special for me. It was NOT love-at-first sight because I hated Android when I first learned about it. I still don't know why. Coming from a poor family background, I got a fully-funded scholarship through Prime Minister ICT R&D Scholarship Program and enrolled in National University of Engineering & Technology (NUST), SEECS Islamabad campus.

In my 3rd semester, Android was at 2.2 Froyo. A company organized a workshop at our campus which was attended by high-level tech folks like CTOs, software architects, and lead engineers. University management decided to send three students to attend that workshop and I was lucky enough to be one of them. In simple words, the whole 3-days workshop was over my head. I was a newbie in C++ programming and didn't know anything about Java. And here I was trying to learn high-level Android.

After the workshop, I decided that Android was not for me. However, the university announced an open programming competition for any technology. But they gave extra points for Android submissions. This was my calling. In greed of those extra points, I took up the challenge. I borrowed the only Android book "Hello Android" from my teacher, Sir Shamyl bin Mansoor, and tried to learn as much as I could. Somehow, I managed to submit my first Android app which I showcased on a borrowed laptop with a very slow emulator of Android 2.2. To my surprise, I won it and got Rs. 100,000 prize money. First thing I bought was an Android phone and my journey started.

I started writing about it in a WordPress blog, organized workshops in different universities, made my final year project a 3D game in Adobe Flash, and AIR deployed on a Samsung Galaxy 10 tablet which had a new Android 4 Holo theme and the great Fragments.

After graduation, I got an opportunity from PacktPub (a book publishing company) to write a full book on Android. This was the best achievement I ever received. I managed to co-author two worldwide published 300+ page books (Learning Android Intents & Mastering Android Game Development) on Android in the following two years.

Having about seven years industry hands-on experience in Android development, I spend a lot of time on writing and sharing my knowledge with the community. I mostly write on my website and on Medium. Besides writing, I have been active in open source and have created some Android libraries like EasyFlipView, Room Explorer, etc.

In 2017, I started doing public speaking again. At first, it was a little tough to manage time while working a full-time job and freelance contracts, but it was worth it. I got more and more active in speaking and gave talks at events like Google IO Extended Karachi & Hyderabad in 2018 and 2019, DevFest 2019 Karachi, Pakistan's first DSC Summit, Kotlin Everywhere 2019, and other local events.

From these events, Sami Kizilbash noticed me and nominated me for becoming a Google Developers Expert. It was a tough time because of a serious medical situation with my father at that time, but a year later in February 2020 I became Pakistan's first Google Developers Expert in Android. I never thought that I would be a GDE in a field like Android. It is a big honor and achievement for me, along with a feeling of responsibility to help the community in a better way now. Android development has been my life fuel, career, brought bread for me and my family and happiness in developing and delivering more than 100 apps. With more than 2.5 billion Android devices today, this is an excellent career choice with high growth and potential for upcoming students and developers.

My GDE journey has been a fantastic one. I have enjoyed every moment of it, all the love I got from Google and fellow GDEs - including Joe Birch who actually inspired me to become GDE, Hasan Abid, Saurabh Arora, and Juhani Lehtimaki, and Saad Hamid who also helped me through the process. In all the chaos of 2020, it was a very talkative year for me, as I did 25+ online talks on Jetpack Compose animations concepts.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I simply love how Mnemonic Bookmarks make code navigation so much faster and easier. When you are working on a large codebase, it becomes harder to remember which method was where and what was happening in another Fragment. Simply, press Ctrl + F11 and choose any number or character, let's say 1. Now, when you press Ctrl + 1, Android Studio will bring you back on that exact line.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Himanshu Singh

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My journey started from my college days. I got selected as an Applied CS facilitator for Android by Google in my second year of university. Because of this, I had to take sessions and help students complete a set of tasks as part of Bootcamp. In my college days I was not very good at Android, so when the opportunity came I took it upon myself to gain some knowledge of Android and then help people with their tasks. Learning to build apps that would be used by a lot of people helped me choose Android as a career. And that is how my journey to become an Android developer started.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I like to use the Macro shortcut in Android Studio.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

As a beginner in any domain, not just Android, please keep asking questions on how to improve and learn from people in the community. Some of them might not answer your queries but a handful of them might. And in this way, you can learn and grow from their experience and when the time is right, you might be able to help someone in the coming future. This is the key to success!

Oluwasegun Famisa

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My journey in becoming an Android Developer started in 2010, my second year of university when I had the opportunity to participate in a program called “Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles” (EPROM). It was a collaboration between MIT and Nokia, and my university was one of the campuses that ran the program. I did not study computer science, so the program was my first exposure to software development. I learned how to build J2ME apps and got exposure to different mobile technologies at the time.

Shortly after the program, I got a work-study opportunity at iQube Labs, where my mentor - James Fowe, who was building a mobile developer community in Nigeria - sent me a bunch of resources and tasks for me to learn how to build Android apps. The Android OS around 2010 was Android Froyo and that was the operating system on which I ran my “Hello world” on Android. Within the next year, I found myself building actual apps on Android Gingerbread.

I have since worked as an Android Developer in different companies ranging from small to mid-sized startups with millions of users, to publicly traded companies, all across many countries. I’ve had the opportunity of working with very brilliant folks that have contributed to my growth and learning.

My journey is not complete without talking about the developer community. I consider myself a product of the community and that’s why I try to give back every now and then when I have the opportunity.

I started getting involved in the developer community at my university - through various student groups, including my local GDG group then co-organized by Moyinoluwa Adeyemi (an Android GDE). I attended meetups and participated in developer challenges and hackathons.

Becoming a GDE for Android is a career milestone I never saw coming. It started in 2016 when John Kimani (Google DevRel manager for SSA) toured my office and we ran into each other at the door. I wasn’t prepared enough to become a GDE the first time my profile was reviewed, but with feedback, guidance, mentorship and hard work, I became an Android GDE in 2018.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to travel to so many countries around the world and meet members of the global Android Developer community. I’ve also given talks at conferences and meetups; including DevFests, Droidcon (Nairobi, Dubai, Berlin, Boston), and 360AnDev, to mention a few, about topics I enjoy - Kotlin, Design Systems, Jetpack Compose, and Developer Productivity Engineering.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

That’s such a tough one, but I’ll say my favourite AndroidDev tip right now is: use the Android code search tool - https://cs.android.com - and Android API documentation as often as possible. (See also: https://androidsrc.dev/)

The two resources have helped me in answering the “why is this not working” question and understanding what’s happening under the hood. A lot of times, I need to really understand what the Framework function I’m calling does, and the answer is almost always in the documentation or in the source code.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

I’ll give two for the price of one:

1. Structure and consistency are important when learning. One can’t possibly know everything, but one can try with enough of these two ingredients. Structured learning is becoming more and more accessible these days than it was, so one should take advantage of it, consistently - through codelabs, or courses and the likes.
2. Get used to reading official documentations and official source codes. This is a valuable and transferable skill regardless of the technology one works with, so I would advise not to shy away from it.

Karolina Pawlikowska

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

From a young age, I’ve always loved science fiction books and movies – I always had a gut feeling that whatever career path I went down, it would have something to do with computers. Programming quickly became my favourite creative outlet – it started with creating websites and apps when I was 11, mainly as a way to enhance my other passions such as drawing and making puzzles for my friends.

I got my first Android phone when I was in high school and immediately knew it would open a whole new world of opportunities for me, so I picked up a few books and found a few online tutorials which got me started with code on my phone running Android 2.1 Eclair.

My first app was a flashcards maker. I needed something like that to help me learn English and I couldn’t find anything online - so I made my own!

Thanks to a few of my passion projects, including a flashcard maker app, I managed to quickly land a job as an Android Engineer while I was still completing my Computer Science degree at university. I then tried working across a few other areas in software engineering, but ultimately, Android was always my favourite and ended up becoming my specialty!

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

It’s not quite a hack, but I honestly don’t know how I lived before ConstraintLayout became a thing! Oh – and Android Weekly’s mailing list, definitely one of the best ways to get all of the relevant news and tutorials in the Android world delivered directly to you every Monday!

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Looking back, I definitely recommend putting effort and being really intentional about seeking out other Android engineers around you. Once I started proactively attending meetups and working with other engineers, my skills and knowledge grew exponentially. Collaborating and bouncing around ideas has always been my favourite way to find creative and innovative solutions to problems I’m working on.